A large and growing population of users is enjoying entertainment through the consumption of digital content items (or simply “content items”), such as music, movies, images, electronic books, and so on. The users employ various electronic devices to consume such content items. Among these electronic devices are electronic book (eBook) reader devices, cellular telephones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), portable media players, tablet computers, netbooks, and the like. As the quantity of available electronic media content continues to grow, along with increasing proliferation of devices to consume that media content, finding ways to enhance user experience continues to be a priority.
Many of these electronic devices enable voice communication. These devices often face practical problems such as double talk, noisy environments, and so forth. In the case of double talk, a communication device receives a far end signal from a far end talker typically over a network. The far end signal may be played via a loudspeaker of the communication device while a near end talker is speaking into microphones of the communication device. The near end talker may be relatively far away from the microphones as compared to a distance of the loudspeaker from the microphones. Accordingly, sound played out of the loudspeaker corresponding to the far end signal may echo and reach the microphones at roughly the same time as sound from the near end talker. This situation is referred to as “double talk”.
Acoustic performance of the communication device is degraded when double talk is present as the near-to-far ratio is often decreased. Additionally, the presence of reverb and/or background noise from sources such as other talkers in the room, or other devices in the room (e.g., TV, radio, etc.) may further deteriorate the speech recognition performance. It is therefore desired to improve the acoustic performance by minimizing the effects of double talk, reverb, and background noise.